Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Search for "Gergis" on the ABC site through Google provides 2 pages of results. The first story is:"Last 50 years were Australia's hottest: study". It's not until the very end of the article that the following editorial note appears in a smaller font:Editor's note (June 21): Since this story was originally broadcast, errors have been identified in aspects of the data processing which may affect the results of this study. As a result, publication has been delayed and the research has been withdrawn from online publication. Professor Karoly says the data will be recalculated, peer reviewed and published in due course.
The world is still waiting for this deeply flawed study to be published. ABC ignored reporting on the manner in which the paper was found to be flawed. Those interested might like to re-visit relevant posts at Climate Audit.

In the meantime in early March ABC uncritically re-published an AFP article that reported on a new study proclaiming:

"We already knew that on a global scale, Earth is warmer today than it was over much of the past 2,000 years," said Shaun Marcott, the lead author of the study, which was published in Science."Now we know that it is warmer than most of the past 11,300 years."

Through the tireless efforts of Steve McIntyre we now know that the specular uptick at the end of Marcott's temperature graph that lead to the alarming claims, is an artefact of an inappropriate statistical methodology, It seems the dates of sediments from cores used in the study were shifted in time up to 1000 years. This effectively shifted warming of the Medieval Warm Period into the modern period. Results that showed cooling were truncated from the period of the uptick. Anyone smell the cherries?

How long now to wait for the ABC to comprehensively report on the issue?

Perhaps this time around rather than adding a footnote, ABC's "journalists" might take the time to fully investigate and report on the matter. However with activists in charge, we won't be holding our breath.

Friday, March 15, 2013

Professor Roger Pielke Jnr has a piece on the commission's latest effort to misrepresent the science of climate change. As Andrew Bolt says: time they were sacked. Perhaps the public can also be refunded their ridiculous salaries.

Badly misrepresent? At no point do Crompton and McAneney ever "assert that the Commission wrongly used insurance losses in the Angry Summer report." Sorry, but this is a bald-faced lie from the Commission. Crompton and McAneney accurately state that the report refers to the "significant impacts of extreme weather on property" during the "angry summer." You can see a tweet below from the Commission which refers uncritically to another recent piece at The Conversation, one that is chock full of scientific inaccuracies. Apparently being completely wrong did not merit a press release, but I digress.

There is actually nothing more becoming of a research institution than researchers willing to engage the public with the results of their scientific research. In democracies, it is OK to crtiique government -- in fact, governance is improved through such critique. There is nothing more offensive than a government that attacks researchers for the temerity to offer legitimate critique. In the US, we saw how the Bush Administration learned that lesson the hard way. It looks like the Climate Commission hasn't taken note.

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